


will this song live on forever / the future is forgiven

by VictoriaPyrrhi



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alternative Timelines, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Implied Tsubaki/Black Star, Manga Verse, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:27:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22355599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoriaPyrrhi/pseuds/VictoriaPyrrhi
Summary: Fully grown into her powers, Angela is prepared to risk everything to try and fix the past, to prevent the deaths of the people who mean everything to her, to right a world that’s fallen into madness. She’s going to do something no one else has ever done before.Maka goes to bed alone after the worst week of her life and wakes up a decade older and next to her weapon partner. This world is nothing like the one they know, and they’re saddled with past mistakes that have left them adrift from each other.It’s up to them and Angela to find a way to make sure this future isn’t forever.
Relationships: Maka Albarn/Soul Eater Evans
Comments: 5
Kudos: 70
Collections: Soul Eater Resonance Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to everyone who helped and encouraged me on this story. Resbang this year was a struggle between a masters degree and working full time, and I can't thank my partners Baph and Flurrin enough for their support and the art that they created! I'm so grateful! Thanks also to Marsh and Bones for the eyes and brainstorming the castle.

There was so much blood. Too much blood for anyone to survive, she thought, unable to look away. Her heart thudded in her chest, drowned out the sound of screaming that she vaguely realized was _her_ until finally the thudding turned into a resounding crack and the church doors flew open, splintering before the might of her father and Stein. She could still hear the thudding, could hear it slowing even as her vision started to dim around the edges, the red so much brighter, so much _more_ and it was all her fault.

* * *

It’s the same refrain over and over again, and he was sick of it. He’s too weak on his own, he’s nothing without his meister -- just useless flesh and bone, useless steel, unable to fight, unable even to protect her from being attacked. He rubbed at his chest and watched as Black*Star walked away, leaving rubble in his wake. _Useless worthless she’s gonna die one day and it’s gonna be your fault you could be better stronger but just don’t_ want _it enough scared little weapon_. He clenched his teeth around his response, around speaking out loud to the voice that had been haunting his soul for months now.

It wasn’t like it was saying anything new.

* * *

She waited. He died, cut down like he always said he would be. Knowing it was going to happen didn’t make it any easier. Sometimes, she would play his words back, over and over, and she’d feel the rage rise up in her chest because why would you say that kind of thing to a child? Why would he kneel down and look her in the eye and give her that little half-smile and say,

“I live by the sword, and I’ll die by the sword, but I’ll always be here to protect you.”

She missed him so much, every day, and all she could think was, _You fucking liar_.

So, she waited. She listened to the meisters and the weapons around her; she learned from Kim and from Black*Star until she couldn’t anymore. She watched as the rest of her universe began to unravel, as the kishin tried to gobble up the world around them, and when she closed her eyes at night, all she could hear was his voice.

_I’ll always be here to protect you._

Every year, she felt herself getting more powerful. She didn’t know a lot about her heritage, and not even Kim could tell her some of the things she wanted to know. Was she growing in power with age? Or was it the madness of the Kishin fueling her powers? Death himself had no answers. Maka, her green eyes dull, just smiled and said she’d see what she found during her research. She never came back with concrete answers, just a shrug of her shoulders and another promise to try.

She stopped asking after a while, started sinking into her magic, learning what she could and couldn’t do. What she couldn’t do, she found a way around.

Angela waited until her 18th birthday, when the moon was new and pitch dark and she could feel her magic twisting through her veins, sinking into the fabric of the world around her. The crumbling stone walls were almost invisible in the night, but it didn’t matter to her. She could pick out the spot where his blood drenched the ground no matter the light, or how many years had passed.

And she thought,

 _You_ lied _, Mifune, but I’ll fix it._


	2. Chapter 2

She dreams of fire, of smoke and ash clogging the air. The demon sword’s scream echoes through her, tearing at her clothes and skin. She can feel the blade sinking into Soul’s flesh, the jerk of his body as he shields her from her own incompetence. The smoke is suffocating, and through it she can just make out another figure, misshapen and _wrong_ and like nothing she’s ever seen before.

Maka screams, fire in her throat.

When she wakes, she’s still screaming, the same way she has almost every night since they made the tense journey back from Italy. Her chest heaves with the struggle for oxygen, and the feeling of blood between her fingers remains a visceral sensation. Her only consolation is that she’s still alone in the apartment, that Soul is still in the infirmary, hopefully sleeping through the night.

“Maka! Maka? What the - “

For a moment, she’s convinced that she’s still dreaming, that this is all a terrible figment of her imagination because Soul is _right there_ , his hair mussed, the little bit of drool dampening the corner of his mouth. But that’s impossible, because she had left him still in the infirmary, recovering from being _bisected_ , from surgery, from her failure -

“Maka,” he says again, resting a hand on her bare shoulder. Light trickles in through the closed blinds from the streetlight, and she doesn't have to imagine the way his mouth pinches at the corners when he’s upset, the worry clear in his voice. She’s heard that tone more than enough over their partnership. Irrationally, it makes her want to cry a little because he shouldn’t be here, he shouldn’t be worried about her when she’s the one who keeps hurting him.

“Soul?” she finally asks, because what else is she supposed to do with the apparition of her partner in her bed. Oh, _god_ , is - her brain stutter-stops through a hundred different scenarios, each one worse than the last until she finally chokes out, voice cracking, “A-are. Are you _dead_?” That has to be it. She had left him at Shibusen, and he had said he was fine, and he must have been lying and now he’s dead. “Was there an attack, was...was it complications from the surgery?”

“Uh...no?” His fingers tense on her shoulder, and she shivers. “What surgery? Why are you here, Maka? Why aren’t you still in the infirmary - Nygus said it would be a couple more days before you were mobile. I would have come and gotten you if you’d called…” he trails off in the wake of her silence and Maka can’t even reassure him because she’s increasingly concerned that she's in the process of having a psychotic break.

“I wasn’t in the infirmary, Soul. _You_ were. You were - your chest -” she bites down on her tongue to stifle the sob building in her throat.

She feels Soul go rigid next to her, and that right there ought to be enough to convince her that he is really real; ghosts don’t press their fingers into skin hard enough to bruise, don’t give off enough heat to make the comforter Maka always sleeps with unnecessary. She takes a deep breath, gets a lungful of Soul’s familiar deodorant, and dives towards the lamp on her nightstand, tugging the pull-cord hard enough that it snaps off in her hand.

Maka isn’t sure what she expects to happen - her brain had conjured up some kind of Cupid and Psyche situation, but Soul doesn’t flee with the light; instead he sits next to her in bed ( _in bed!_ ), blinking grumpily at the sudden brightness.

“What the hell, Maka?”

“You’re real.” Her hand clenches around the broken lamp chain.

“I...yes. Of course I am? Should I not be real?” He looks a little more awake, but confused. He frowns and reaches out to poke at her cheek. “Are _you_ real?”

Maka scowls and bats his hand way, reflex more than anything, and tries to catalog everything she’s seeing -- including Soul, who is definitely shirtless, sheets pooling around his waist. She darts her eyes back up to his chest before she spends anymore time trying to figure out whether or not she can see the waistband of his boxers. Her breath catches in her throat and she must make some kind of noise out loud, because Soul’s hand is back on her shoulder in an instant, warm and comforting. She remembers holding his hand just that afternoon, sitting next to his bedside, his palm clammy and his skin pale with pain he refused to acknowledge. He’d been wearing a shirt then, one of his baseball tees that she sometimes stole out of the laundry when it was her turn to fold the clothes, but it had done nothing to make her forget what the shirt was covering up.

Now...now she can reach out and touch bare, healed flesh, if she were so inclined. It isn’t raw, tender flesh she’s faced with, but old scar tissue, just a shade or so darker than the rest of Soul’s skin, raised and ragged; the pock marks left behind by Stein’s haphazard triage and the surgery aren’t days old, but years. It’s insane. Is this what going mad feels like? She feels like she’s holding both versions of Soul in her mind and she can’t reconcile the two truths into something that makes sense.

“Maka.” Soul’s voice breaks through the racing of her mind, anchoring her back into the...present - the future? “What’s the last thing you remember?”

She blinks at him, mouth hanging agape. The more she stares, the more differences she can point out - his hair is longer, scruffier in the back and overdue for a haircut. There are fine lines around the corners of his eyes, and actual facts, legitimate scruff clinging to his jawline and upper lip, not the four hairs Soul had taken an extra half hour in the bathroom to “shave” last month. She has a million questions she wants to address before she tackles _that one_ , but what pops out of her mouth is,

“Are you _trying_ to grow a beard?”

Soul screws up his face, mouth twisting into a scowl. “I told you, I _needed_ to shave -”

“No, you didn’t,” she says. “But you really do now.”

“I -” She watches in fascination as he touches his jaw, fingers raking over the white hairs there, infinitely thicker than they’d been before... _before_. “What the fuck,” he mutters, cheeks pinking.

“I left you at Shibusen, in the infirmary,” she blurts out, glueing her eyes to Soul’s face. He’s just a little taller than her like this, her brain adds that to the catalog of weirdness, and she tries not to think about it. He looks _older_. She swallows. “You had...it was -”

“Maka.”

When did he learn that tone of voice, she wonders, almost perfectly calibrated to set her mind at ease? “You had just gotten this,” she finally says, and lets her fingers ghost across the scar on his chest.

“Just gotten it?” He sounds like he’s trying to talk down Black*Star from doing something stupid.

“You came out of surgery yesterday. We got back from Italy just before that.”

“I remember,” Soul mumbles, touching his own fingers to the scar. Maka yanks her hand back before they can connect, then cringes because it’s such a complete overreaction to a nothing gesture.

“What about you?” she asks because she’s starting to get the feeling that his answer is going to be very, very different.

* * *

Soul shifts uncomfortably on the bed. It's bigger than the one he’d gone to sleep in, and he’s definitely on the wrong side instead of sprawled across the middle like normal. The sheets are different, and once Maka turns on the lamp, he can see that the walls aren’t covered in his old familiar posters. They aren’t covered in the posters that Maka has in her bedroom either, though. As far as he can tell, they aren’t in either of their familiar rooms, and it’s another unsettling piece of a puzzle he doesn’t want to put together.

As if waking up next to Maka, her screaming lancing through his brain and his heart, isn’t enough of an indicator that they aren’t in Kansas anymore. His immediate reaction had been to make sure Maka was okay - he reaches out without thinking, and by the time he realizes that he’s wearing nothing more than his boxers and she isn’t in much more, it’s too late to fling himself away from both the bed and the situation.

The bed, the partial nudity, the screaming - as much as he wants to focus on those things because they are tangible things that he can address, Soul quickly realizes that those are the least of their worries. The last thing Maka remembers was _months_ ago. His chest has long since been healed, they fought Chrona again, became almost comrades - the _kishin_ , jesus.

Soul swallows, throat tight. How can she not remember the kishin? Is it really possible that all those memories were erased for Maka? What had happened to her while she was in the infirmary? Is this some kind of after effect of Arachne’s paralyzing threads that even Stein hadn’t anticipated?

 _Fuck_ , if he’d just been better, if he could have protected her instead of failing _again_ -

“Soul.” She tries to keep her voice steady, to fill the authoritative meister role that she pulls around herself like a robe whenever she feels like she’s losing control, but he can still hear the cracks in her confidence. “Why are you looking at me like that? What’s going on?”

He takes a deep breath. “Maka, that was...that was months ago. You don’t remember anything after that fight with Chrona?”

She narrows her eyes, jaw clenching. “What do you mean, remember? It _just_ happened, Soul,” she says, but it sounds like she’s trying to convince herself as much as she is trying to convince him.

He takes her hand carefully, and deliberately places it against his chest again. “I’m all healed, Maka,” he says carefully. It’s only partially true, really, but he doesn’t exactly feel up to diving into his own screaming nightmares; it’s so much simpler to stick with the physical. It’s honestly pure luck that they hadn’t _both_ woken up shouting. “You felt it yourself - this isn’t fresh.”

Her fingernails scrape lightly across his scarred skin, intentional and tender, and for a moment, it feels like his whole heart stutters to a stop.

“I don’t think I forgot,” she says quietly, after a long moment. She withdraws her hand and tucks it in her lap. Green eyes pierce his. “I think we both did.”

Which...what? It’s ridiculous because Soul _knows_ he left Maka still immobile, her face freshly scrubbed from Black*Star’s magic marker stunt. He also knows they didn’t - that this isn’t what they _do_ , this bed-sharing thing, regardless of the messy feelings he’s been developing and studiously learning how to ignore.

Soul opens his mouth to protest, but he can’t stop thinking about those first minutes after he’d woken up to Maka next to him, that sense of right-wrong he’d felt, his instinctive reaction warring with his brain telling him that something wasn’t right. And yet, he’d been so willing to pin it all on Maka - that she was the one who was affected by whatever this was, that she needed him to be there, to fix it.

As usual, it’s the other way around. She’s right and he’s useless to help.

His stomach roils and he touches his fingers to his cheeks again, feeling the coarse hairs that hadn’t been there when he’d gotten into bed last night. Alone. Next to him, Maka looks like she can’t figure out what to focus on. Her eyes dart from face to his chest, then back to stare at her own body and that - _oh_.

 _Oh shit_.

It’s a monumentally stupid thing to fixate on when all this...whatever is happening, but his eyes are drawn to the gentle swelling of Maka’s breasts underneath the loose tank top she’s got on, to the way her collarbones hold the shadows cast by the lamplight, to her hair, braided back and hanging almost to her waist. There are tiny ruby studs in her ears, and the thin chain of a locket draped around her neck that he’s never seen before. She looks...fuck, she looks like an adult, and Soul’s struck with the urge to find a mirror. What does she see when she looks at him? Is he really older, too? Sure he can feel his facial hair, thicker than it’s ever been, but he’s been shaving regularly for months, no matter how much Maka had teased him about not needing to. He knows his scar is all healed, but it looks older, less the angry red he’d gotten used to seeing. It looks like it’s been healed for years instead of months and somehow that’s more unsettling than the facial hair.

“How could we both forget?” he finally asks, staring at Maka’s hands now. Her nails are still short, but her fingers are longer, scars that he doesn’t remember her getting laced across the skin. “How come I remember more than you? Maka, there’s...there’s so much that happened in those months and you're telling me you don't remember any of it?"

“I don’t _know_ ,” she snaps. “I told you the last thing I remember - either I’m forgetting or you’re hallucinating.”

He stiffens because it feels like an accusation, because it’s not impossible. His dreams, the little demon, his madness. Maybe it all _is_ a hallucination. He feels like he did after Italy, like everything is slipping away from him, and for the first time since he woke up, he can feel the little demon in his soul stirring, can feel his dark amusement, but it’s more muted than it has been since he was first infected.

Could it really be possible that he made up the last few months? Is he stuck in another demon-induced nightmare right now?

He can feel the warmth of Maka’s hand between his shoulder blades, and he thinks it’s supposed to calm him down, but it feels so different from the last time he remembers her palm against his bare skin.

“Shh, hey, it’s - I didn’t mean it. I don’t think you’re hallucinating,” she says, her voice thick.

Soul sucks in a deep breath. He remembers intimately the way Maka had sunk into his madness to fight and to save Chrona, maybe he never pulled her out, maybe they were still there - he hears Oni’s broken laugh.

“What if I am, Maka,” he finally gasps. “The Black Blood -”

“The Black Blood? Soul, what do you mean?”

His throat tries to close up, tries to keep his secret because he doesn’t want to worry her, doesn’t want to feel weak again and again, but if this is a hallucination anyway, what does it matter. “I’m infected with the Black Blood,” he chokes out. “When Chrona cut me - something must have gone wrong. I’ve been having nightmares ever since and I spent months not telling you.”

Maka’s fingers twitch and curl against his spine and Soul shivers. “Didn’t you trust me?” she finally whispers. Soul blinks and stares at her. Her face is carefully blank in a way that makes Soul want to stuff every word he’s ever said back into his mouth. She looks like she does when Spirit pulls another one of his stunts, and the bile rises up in his throat.

“It isn’t - of course I trust you,” he stammers out, before shutting his mouth with an audible click. Even in a hallucination he’s not sure he can admit his greatest fears, his weakness. He’s not sure that speaking them won’t make them come to life.

Maka’s face softens minutely, but he still feels like he fucked something up. “Of course,” she says, but she keeps her hand on his back, grounding him.

“This is all so…” He waves his hands around helplessly.

Her shoulders slump, like all that had been holding her up was tension and adrenaline and suddenly it was all gone. “I know,” she murmurs. “But I didn’t mean it, I don’t really think you’re hallucinating. It’s not just memories I’m missing, Soul - it’s time. You’re not fifteen anymore.”

The shoulder of her tank top slowly gives up the good fight and slips down her shoulder. He can’t look away. “Yeah, well, neither are you,” he says before he can stop the words. “I don’t think hallucinations would be quite this detailed,” he finally admits, letting himself relax a little.

Maka flushes, cheeks bright pink, and he’s slightly mortified to realize that his face probably matches. “Maybe it’s a spell?”

He clears his throat. “If it were a spell, they’d have to have taken away...at least ten years? Maybe more.” He can’t imagine losing a whole decade, of that time just being _gone_ , locked away somewhere, or erased. A decade of experiences, of music, of people - what about his family, their friends? He’d have lost almost half his life.

A decade of partnership, of whatever this is with Maka that has them in the same bed, barely dressed and, and - he shuts that thought down immediately.

“Or,” she adds with a tiny grin, “Maybe it’s just time travel.”

Soul buries his face in his hands. “Fuck’s sake.”

* * *

It isn’t funny, not even a little bit, but Maka laughs anyway as Soul tries to suffocate himself in his palms. She laughs because it’s such a _Soul_ gesture and the alternative is definitely that mental break down she’s been staving off since she woke up because of whatever this is. Missing time? Amnesia? A spell? It might as well be time travel as anything else, like something out of one of those novels she keeps borrowing from Liz, but with fewer burly men in kilts (probably) and more awkward bed sharing.

“Are you okay?” he asks, voice tentative in a way he almost never is, and then makes a face like he knows what a ridiculous question that is.

She’d been in shock when she first woke up, disoriented from her nightmare, but now all she can think about is Soul next to her in bed, bare skinned and warm. It’s too much, awkward and uncomfortable in the face of Soul’s confession that he’s _poisoned_ , that he’s been hiding it from her for months, if his memories are to be believed. She removes her hand from his back and tries not to be obvious about it.

“I...maybe? I don’t know,” she says finally, still trying to wrap her brain around everything. She clears her throat. “I’m gonna -” she jerks her head towards the half-cracked open door she’s desperately hoping is the bathroom. She can see white tile and the corner of a rug peeking out.

Maka throws the covers back before Soul can because the thought of Soul leaving the bed first makes something in her guts squirm unpleasantly. The air’s cold on her bare legs, and _oh_ , she is definitely not wearing pants, okay. She slides off the bed, tugging the hem of her shirt down to try and retain some modesty. The bottom of it hits just below her ass, which isn’t great, but it means she’s not going to flash panties walking across the room. That’s enough of a win for the moment.

Behind her, still mostly under the covers, Soul makes a noise in his throat, soft enough that she knows she wasn’t supposed to hear it. Maka’s face burns, regardless. She wants to turn around and yell, maybe throw something, or shove a pillow into his face because that would feel _normal_. That would mean this was just like every other morning when she would catch Blair in his bed suggestively, or when Soul would make some callous idiot-boy comment about her body. But this isn’t just like every morning and even if she doesn’t want to admit it; every day for the last week she’s left her partner recuperating in his infirmary bed and she wants to blame it on the change in routine, but it’s so much more than that. Nothing’s felt normal since their frantic flight back from Italy. So instead, she walks away, towards the faint light coming through the bathroom door.

She doesn’t know what she’s expecting - there was the vague hope that the bathroom would hold some kind of clue about...whatever this is. Their life together? Their future? Instead, the tile is freezing under her feet, much colder than it should be considering that when she crawled into her bed last night and went to sleep, it was late summer. The shower curtain is in a floral pattern that matches the bath mat and the towels - all in colors that she finds particularly soothing. There’s bath salts on the edge of the tub, makeup haphazardly scattered around the sink. Her eyes dart over to the toothbrush holder. Her favorite brand of toothpaste, flosser. One toothbrush.

She takes a deep breath before looking into the mirror.

* * *

Soul isn’t exactly surprised when he hears the shower turn on a few minutes later. Maka’s always been a bathroom thinker, and he’s willing to cling to any passing piece of familiarity at this point. He groans and presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, like that’s going to stop the headache forming behind his eyes. He tries to calm his brain, listens to the steady sound of the shower, but eventually, Soul swings his legs over the side of the bed. He’d rather be dressed when Maka finishes in the bathroom - no need to make this more awkward than it already is.

He’s still reeling from the Thing they’re very blatantly ignoring, from seeing her wearing not much more than an oversized tank top he’s almost positive is his. God, what if it really _is_ time travel? They’re both clearly physically older, so did they...what? Inhabit the bodies of their older selves? Are copies of themselves still back in their own time, or have their bodies disappeared? Is the past still going? Did it stop when they were transported forward? He’s used to the visceral reaction he has whenever Maka steals his clothes - like she thinks she’s getting away with something and he doesn’t notice, but everything about this is just _more_ right now. Is it because he’s an adult, that this is an adult body he’s inhabiting? Is it because of what they - their other selves did? Does his body have some kind of...sex memory?

He might not remember the last decade of his apparent life, but he has no trouble remembering the sheer number of accidental boners he’s popped thanks to his meister. It’s probably just Maka.

His boxers are wrinkled, but not immediately filthy, so he looks around the floor until he finds a pair of well-worn jeans that he tugs up over his hips, buttoning them as he searches for a shirt. He frowns when he doesn’t find anything on the floor or on top of the dresser. He opens a couple of drawers, but it’s all very obviously not his clothing he finds. His stomach sinks, but he ignores it like he’s trying to ignore everything else right now and ventures out of the bedroom, flicking on the overhead on his way out.

The apartment is small - about the same size as the one they’ve been sharing since they graduated to the EAT class. It could almost be the same place - he recognizes the couch as the same one that he’s been parking his ass on since he was a preteen, but the chairs and coffee table are all different. He makes his way into the kitchen and stares at the cabinets for a moment before shrugging and opening the one that usually has the coffee stuff in it.

 _Bingo_.

He’s halfway through his first cup of coffee when Maka comes out of the bedroom. He pushes Maka’s favorite mug towards her already doctored with sugar, no cream, and she sits next to him on the couch, swiping the mug.

“So,” he says. “Pick your poison. A spell? Time travel? Head trauma?”

Maka takes a sip of her coffee and closes her eyes. “It doesn’t feel like a concussion,” she says, and he hates that they’re both familiar enough with the sensation to be able to rule it out.

Soul laughs, sharp and bitter. “God, that’s fucked up. We’re fucked up, Maka,” he says, and she slumps against him carefully.

Her answering, “Yeah,” is so quiet he almost doesn’t hear it. “What if we didn’t forget?”

“So a spell, then?”

“It seems the most likely, but I can’t think of who would want to take such a huge chunk of our lives away. Who could do it? How much power would that take to erase a whole decade?”

“A lot, I’m guessing.”

“So much,” she murmurs.

“Why, though? And why don’t our memory gaps align? Is it just us?”

“Those are the million dollar questions, aren’t they?” They both sigh, and Maka shifts against him, settling almost in the crook of his arm. He’s not used to being physically larger than she is and he tenses with the knowledge of how well she fits there.

“This is our couch,” she says after a long moment, voice pensive, and Soul frowns.

“Yeah, same one.”

“And my dresser is in the bedroom.”

Soul takes another sip of his coffee. It looks like Maka’s come to the same conclusion that he has and they _are_ going to address the elephant in the room. “But not my clothes,” he says.

“And only my toothbrush. Did you check the other bedroom?”

He had, and it was full of bookshelves and a desk. It had been blatantly obvious that this wasn’t _their_ space at all. “An office,” he says. “ _Your_ office.” It’s Maka’s space, Maka’s life, and he’s intruding at best.

As it turned out, things _could_ get more awkward than waking up mostly naked next to your meister. Maka’s a shade of pink that has nothing to do with being flushed from the shower, and Soul can’t quite meet her in the eyes.

He wants to say something, to say that he’s had some kind of new insight about their situation, to discuss how they’re going to figure out what happened, what they’re supposed to be doing, some kind of plan of action. Instead, all can think of is how they don’t live together anymore, that they may have done more than sleep in the same bed last night and neither of them can remember if they did, or how it happened.

Soul feels paralyzed with indecision, with all the unknowns of their situation, with all the ways their lives might have gone sideways and he’d never know how or why, just that things are nothing like he’d expected.

They sit, side by side on the couch, and drink their coffee in silence.


	3. Chapter 3

The thing is, she knows it worked. She wakes up exhausted, her magical reserves completely drained in a way that she’s never really experienced before, so it must have worked. There’s no other explanation. Angela wakes up in her _bed_ , when she knows she’d gone to sleep in a tent just outside the ruins of Arachne’s castle. She can hear the sounds of Tsubaki moving in the kitchen, her quiet humming achingly familiar, and Angela stares at the ceiling because _it worked_ but how is she going to be able to _tell_. There was no existing spell for what she wanted, for what she had done, no way to map how she had succeeded.

She had expected to wake up in the shitty tent she’d dug out of an old pile of Black*Star’s things, maybe a little cold, but triumphant. She had expected to walk out into the late autumn sunrise and see Mifune sitting there; maybe he would have rekindled her dead campfire, and he’d be boiling water for the godawful instant coffee he used to love so much. He wouldn’t smile at her, but he’d nod his head to acknowledge what she’d done for him, and she’d sit on the log next to him, curled up under his arm. She’d be safe and warm. It would be just like how it used to be.

But she’s in her bed. And she doesn’t know what happened.

Tsubaki has coffee and breakfast ready for her when she finally gets up the nerve to get out of bed. She expects something, some kind of acknowledgement for what she’d done last night, but instead she gets the same smile she’s gotten from Tsubaki every morning since she’d come to live with her and Black*Star. Angela’s more than old enough to handle her own shit in the mornings, but she thinks that Tsubaki likes the routine more than anything else, especially now that it’s just the two of them.

“Morning, Angie,” she says.

“Morning, Tsu.” Angela plops herself down at the table and pokes at her eggs. There’s a nervous energy thrumming through her, despite her exhaustion. The food helps her bone deep weariness, but does nothing to curtail her need to get up and get out and _look_. She sneaks another peak at Tsubaki, but the older woman looks the same as she always does, her hair pulled up, neatly dressed, focused on her tablet reading the news and the morning’s dispatch from Shibusen. She doesn’t seem perturbed, like the whole world order has been turned on its head, like everything’s changed.

For the first time since she completed the spell, Angela feels unsure.

“How’re you feeling,” she finally asks, darting a glance at Tsubaki. She looks up from her tablet and smiles her small, quiet smile. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes, but that’s nothing new.

“I’m fine, Angie. Did you sleep well?”

“I...yeah, I guess so.” Tsubaki’s acting like Angela hadn’t taken off several days ago to make her pilgrimage to Arachne’s ruins with a flimsy excuse about a training exercise. It’s as though she’d never left. Angela tamps down on the burgeoning panic in her chest. Her spell did _something_ , she knows. All of that energy doesn’t just dissipate into the air, it has to channel something. She’s just not sure _what_ anymore. “Kind of restless with the moon and all,” she says a little too late.

Tsubaki smiles again, a little more genuinely. “You wouldn’t be the only one. Black*Star used to call it the Assassin’s Moon.”

Angela returns her smile carefully. “Did he really? I don’t remember that.”

“Well, he was definitely the only one who called it that. He insisted it made him sneakier.” She laughs, and if it’s a little wet-sounding, they both ignore it. It’s been almost two years, but it still hurts to talk about him.

“Did it?”

Tsubaki chokes out a laugh, loud and damp. “Oh god, not even a little bit. He was the absolute worst at stealth, and the moon had nothing to do with it, but he made up for it everywhere else.” Angela knows he got better at it, could remember the way he used to melt out of the shadows, but that was closer to the end. The memories are fuzzy - a lot of things about that time in her life are hazy or have been subsumed by memories of Mifune, but she can kind of still remember the way Black*Star’s sheer presence would give him away...if he didn’t open his mouth and do it first.

Angela had always been fascinated by it, by the contrast between him and Mifune, how the two people who had meant the most to her had managed to be so fundamentally similar and yet desperately different. How those differences ultimately meant one had killed the other.

She takes another bite of her eggs and wonders how much things have changed because of what she did. For a wild moment, she wonders if bringing Mifune back means that Black*Star might have come back, too - what if she changed the whole course of events and everyone who had died at the hands of Asura and his minions were alive again and walking around like nothing had happened?

Tsubaki’s eggs taste like ash in her mouth. She has to figure out what the spell actually did.

She’s washing up the breakfast dishes on autopilot when her phone chirps at her. She glances over and sees the notification for her monthly research meeting with Maka. Angela hadn’t been planning on going, had expected that she wouldn’t need their research meetings any longer. She expected to still be with Mifune, to be handling the aftermath of her spell, so fixated that she’d forgotten to cancel.

An oversight that’s swiftly turning into a blessing. She opens up her texts and fires one off to Maka to confirm their usual time at the library. Angela doesn’t know what went wrong, but she knows what she did. Maybe that will be enough for them to finally get some answers.

* * *

Maka is rummaging through her room when she hears the buzzing rattle of a phone going off. She looks around, unsure if it’s hers or Soul’s, and finds the culprit plugged in on her dresser. She’s pretty sure it’s her phone, but she’s not about to burst into the bathroom where Soul’s showering to double check. It’s a model that she’s never seen before, and it’s a more concrete reminder that this is technically the _future_. She picks it up, and while it’s both bigger and lighter than the phone she’s used to, it’s still the same brand and the basic functionality doesn’t seem to have changed too much other than a few less buttons than she’s used to.

The lock screen is a picture of a large group of people. Maka ignores the notification on the screen in favor of staring at it, her eyes raking over faces that are at once familiar and alien - Tsubaki, Black*Star, Kid, Patti, Liz, herself, Soul. The other teams she knows from their class are there, too - meisters and weapons that she’d considered acquaintances at best and competitors in her worst moments. Maka herself is standing between Tsubaki and Kim; Patti is leaning on Harvar who’s next to Ox. Kid is dead center, not quite scowling, but not quite smiling, either. Soul is next to him. Everyone is clearly older, and no one is where Maka would have expected them to be. Patti and Black*Star are the only ones giving their biggest, cheesiest smiles for the camera, and the Pots are crouched in the front, making faces and looking like they’re almost teenagers. They look like a group of _friends_ , tired and a little worn, but they all look relaxed around each other.

Maka’s eyes are drawn to Black*Star again, to the one face that she can’t place. It’s a girl, draped piggyback style over Black*Star. She’s grinning, but there’s something old and reserved in her eyes, even though she’s probably about the same age at Fire and Thunder. Maka knows for a fact that she’s never seen her before, but she looks familiar nonetheless, like her name is lurking just out of sight, and if Maka were unsure about whether or not a spell is responsible for her and Soul’s current predicament, this picture, this feeling of distanced familiarity, would probably be enough to convince her.

She swallows and dimly registers the sound of the shower turning off. She taps the phone and without thinking about it, types in her mother’s birthday. The phone unlocks and Maka chokes out a bitter laugh.

_**Still on for meeting today? 1:00 at the library good for you?** _

It’s from someone named Angela, which sounds familiar; Maka racks her brain, but can’t figure out a single person she knows named Angela, can’t think of face that might be connected. She sighs, frustrated at knowing that there’s something big she’s missing. She opens up her calendar instead and sure enough, there’s a meeting scheduled for today, one with “Angie” that’s been recurring monthly on her calendar for the last year or so.

“What the fuck,” she murmurs, pulling the text message back up. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

_**Sure; see you there** _

She sends the message and stares at her phone for a few seconds before taking a deep breath. “Okay. This makes sense. Let’s do this.”

“What makes sense?” Soul asks over her shoulder. She doesn’t jump out of her skin, but it’s a very near thing.

“Jesus christ, Soul.” She turns, intent on giving him a piece of her mind, but her thoughts kind of stutter to a stop when faced with Soul, warm and damp with a towel wrapped loosely around his waist and not much else.

“What? I thought you knew I was there,” he says, and she would almost believe him if it weren’t for the familiar smirk on his face.

“Where are your clothes,” she asks instead, swinging her eyes back to her phone.

“I was hoping you’d found something clean I could wear around here.”

“I...with what you said this morning, I didn’t really look.” She clenches her jaw and starts scrolling through her message history with this Angela person, rather than think about yet another communication misstep between them, about what it means that even though they’re clearly living apart now, she doesn’t even have a “just in case” drawer for Soul in her guest room. She can feel Soul hovering behind her.

Soul shrugs a little, like it doesn’t matter, even though they both know it does. “I needed to dry off anyway,” he says.

“That’s what towels are for,” she says, face heating.

“Not as helpful as you’d think when _someone_ steamed up the bathroom so much that I might as well have just washed my clothes.”

“It’s not my fault there isn’t a fan in the bathroom!”

Soul laughs and sits down on the edge of the bed; Maka absolutely doesn’t look at his reflection in the mirror propped against her dresser. “I mean, it’s your apartment, so technically it’s your fault.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Was your phone in with your clothes?” she asks, changing the subject. Behind her, Soul grins because he knows as well as she does that using that particular tactic is as good as admitting he’s in the right.

“You know, I didn’t think to check,” he says, frowning. “That’s...that’s weird, right?”

“‘Weird’ like part of a spell ‘weird,’ or just weird for you?”

“Dunno.” Soul leans over the edge of the bed, and Maka gets a flash of hip that has her ears burning. Soul yelps a little and in one fell swoop loses his towel and falls off the bed. Maka bites her lip and stares at her phone hard enough that she’s legitimately concerned it might catch on fire. “ _Oh god_ ,” he says quietly from the floor. Maka doesn’t dare chance a look in the mirror again. “Found it,” he says after a long moment.

“Did you find your pants, too?” Maka asks before she can stop herself, and she just barely resists the urge to slap her hand over her traitorous mouth. There’s waking up in bed partially but mostly clothed next to someone you consider to be one of your best friends, your partner...and then there’s whatever is happening behind her _at this very moment_ , and she doesn’t feel equipped to deal with any of it, but especially not the nudity part right now.

Soul makes a noise from the floor that sounds suspiciously like a laugh, followed by some shuffling and the clear sound of a zipper. “You can look again,” he says.

“Do you,” she starts, stops because her voice cracks a little. She clears her throat, tries again. “Do you know anyone named Angela?”

Soul pulls himself back onto the bed and shakes his head. “Doesn’t sound familiar, why?”

“I’ve apparently got a meeting with her in an hour, and I’ve been meeting with her months now.”

He straightens up and meets her eyes in the mirror. “Are you going to go?”

“I think I have to. If we want to get a handle on what’s happening to us, we’ve got to start somewhere,” she says.

“I want to go with you,” Soul says. There’s a tightness around his eyes that says he’s going to be stubborn about this.

“We could cover more ground if we split up,” Maka says, giving in to her initial reaction to argue, but her voice wavers, and Soul can tell.

“We’d have to have another lead to make that worth our while,” he counters.

“We might be able to _find_ a lead if we go ahead and split up.”

Soul shakes his head, “Look, I get where you’re coming from but we don’t know what’s really going on here, Maka. Maybe it would save us time, or maybe something horrible happens. I don’t...I don’t think splitting up is a good idea." His mouth twists, almost a smile. “C’mon, we’ve both watched way too much Scooby Doo to think that splitting up works.”

Maka huffs out a laugh, “Yeah, okay. You’re right.” She stands finally and makes her way over to the bed, carefully doesn’t think about sitting down next to Soul, the two of them propped against the headboard. “We can go together. It’ll be good to have the backup. But before that, I thought maybe we should go through our phones and see if there are any clues in there.”

“Mm, good idea.” Soul waggles his phone at her with a little smile, and Maka feels relieved. Together, they settle in to do some digging.

Maka digs deeper into her texts first, finding threads with different people, reading through her history with the mysterious Angela, but whatever their relationship, Maka can’t seem to get a grasp on it. Her replies are short at best, terse at worst to almost everyone in her history, and there’s almost nothing from more than 18 months ago. She flips over to the pictures instead, and it’s clear that a decade hasn’t been enough to turn Maka into much of a photographer. It’s mostly pictures of sunrises and sunsets, the occasional food pic, and even more rarely, pictures of people. They’re mostly of their friends, candid shots of two or more people eating out, in the coffee shop, walking down the sidewalk together. Half of them are blurry and Maka tries not to be too embarrassed by it, tries to focus instead on the story she must have been trying to tell.

Soul relaxes next to her as he idly flips through his phone, like physical proximity to her is somehow soothing. She closes her eyes for a moment and focuses on the warmth of his body, of the _presence_ he gives off when he’s near her, and with a sudden burst of clarity, she knows that what she’s feeling is her partner’s soul.

They park at the library at one on the dot, Soul’s familiar orange monstrosity of a motorcycle announcing their presence with a dull roar. Maka doesn’t like being late, but they both agreed that it was better to show up late and hope that the mysterious Angela would be waiting for them, rather than be early and raise suspicions when they don’t recognize her.

“We’re going to raise suspicions anyway,” Maka grumbles. “I’m pretty sure it’s only been me meeting with her.”

“Yeah, well. One suspicious thing at a time, Nancy Drew.”

Maka rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling a little, and it feels good, feels _normal_. She looks up and catches sight of a girl sitting on the library stairs, staring at them. She looks familiar, but only in as much as Maka is fairly sure she’s seen her in the pictures on her cell phone.

* * *

Angela is a little early to the library for maybe the first time since she and Maka started meeting. Normally, she’d go in and wait at their usual table, but after last night, she’s struggling with the idea of being cooped up inside. It’s the only reason she sees Maka first, Maka _and_ Soul, actually, which she was not expecting. She doesn’t remember the last time she saw the two of them together without it being in a group. She blames her shock on why she doesn’t immediately noticing that Maka and Soul are _soaking_ in the aura of her magic. She’s briefly, desperately glad that she decided to sit on the stairs because her knees suddenly feel like jelly.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says quietly, and “ _What the fuck_ ,” because seriously, what the actual fuck. For a long moment, all she can do is stare, her brain trying to parse how the fuck the spell did...whatever this is. Soul and Maka stare up at her while her brain attempts to reset, and she eventually drags herself to her feet and waves.

They give each other an incredibly unsubtle look, and slowly make their way up the stairs while Angela tries to figure out what to say.

“Uh, hi, Angela,” Maka says, and even if Angela couldn’t see the magic swirling around the two, the awkward smile and stilted greeting would have been more than enough to tip her off that something was wrong. Maka’s become more reserved over the years. With every person she lost, she pulled away a little more, and, well. It’s not like Angela can blame her. It’s not like she reacted particularly well, either.

She means to ease into it, maybe invite the two of them to coffee instead of the library. What comes out instead is, “You’re not my Maka.”

The woman in front of her stiffens and the man goes on high alert, like he’s going to jump between them, and that more than anything convinces her that these are not _her_ Maka and Soul.

Maka’s smile hasn’t left her face, but it’s gone brittle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she tries, and Angela backs away a little, hands raised.

“I think you do, and that’s okay because I want to find out what’s going on as much as you do.”

“Doubtful,” Soul mutters, but Maka relaxes just a touch.

Angela takes the opening. “Considering it’s my magic that’s all over you two, yeah. I’m pretty sure just as much.”

After some discussion, they end up at a little cafe a few blocks from the library because Angela knows that no matter how quiet they are, the library is full of people who are, by nature, over-curious busibodies. The coffee shop, she argues, is full of people who are so intent on pretending they aren’t interested in anything at all that no one would bother eavesdropping. Soul agrees because he prefers the idea of being in a public space where there are witnesses to the fact that they’re talking to a witch. Maka hasn’t said much of anything, just put her hand on Soul’s arm when he and Angela started sniping at each other. She doesn’t seem concerned that Angela is a witch, which completely boggles Soul’s mind because hunting witches is literally what they _do_. For a living.

“How are you cool with this?” he hisses.

“Soul, we’ve been meeting for a year. I think if Angela meant me any harm, it would have happened already.”

He shoots a red-eyed glare at the younger woman. “How do you know whatever this spell is isn’t just that?”

Maka rolls her eyes. “Well, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have straight up told the both of us that she’d cast something, first of all. And second, it’s the best lead we’ve got right now. Just...give it a chance.”

“And if it goes south?”

Maka’s smile is small but full of a familiar fierceness that he’s missed. “Then we do what we’re trained to do.” They stare at each other for a moment, and completely miss the look on Angela’s face.

He sighs, but wedges himself into the corner chair of the tiny table they snag anyway, back to the wall. His coffee sloshes a little but doesn’t spill as Maka and Angela take the remaining seats, their knees bumping the table top.

“I didn’t cast anything on you guys at all,” Angela says, frowning into her mocha. “The spell wasn’t meant for you - trust me when I say that this is just a much a shock to me as it is to you.”

Soul snorts, remembering the feeling of waking up next to Maka. “Again, doubtful.” This time when his coffee sloshes, it’s because Maka’s rammed her foot into his shin, zero remorse on her face.

“What did I just say? Stop picking fights, I want to hear what she has to say so we can figure out how to fix whatever went wrong.” He grumbles a little, but subsides, focusing instead on glaring between Angela and the rings of dried coffee on the table. Maka leans forward. “So, the story from the top, if you please.”

Angela stares at them for a long moment before shaking her head. “You really have no idea who I am, do you?” They both shake their heads. She exhales, almost a laugh. “It’s...complicated. I don’t...the spell I did was supposed to fix something that never should have happened, but the spell didn’t specify how it would manifest…”

“And you did it anyway?” Soul asks, incredulous.

“What would _you_ do, if it was someone you loved? If it was the only parent you’d ever known who’d been killed?” Angela keeps her voice low, but it’s a struggle. “If, once they died, the whole world went to shit?”

“Not fuck with unpredictable magic,” Soul snaps, and Maka can’t remember the last time she’d seen him this riled up. “You’re playing with people’s lives. This is exactly why we _hunt_ witches.”

“Not all witches are bad. Not me, not Kim...there are a ton of us who are fighting against the Kishin and we’re _dying_ , the same way that meisters are dying, that weapons are dying. So yeah, I took a chance. I researched.” She turns to Maka. “We both researched,” and if it’s a little bit of a fib, well, she has to make them understand. “The spell works, it _worked_ , or you wouldn’t be here -” She stops, suddenly, grip loosening on her cup. “Oh, god. I think I know what it did.”

“What?” It’s Maka’s turn to lean forward. “What happened?”

“I thought it might mess with the timeline, because I mean, it’s not...the spell wasn’t geared towards bringing someone back from the dead, it was meant to fix a wrong.”

Soul meets Maka’s stare. “I fucking told you it was time travel.”


	4. Chapter 4

Angela insists that they go back to the house she shares with Tsubaki because that’s where she’s stashed all her research, and now that they have a vague idea of what’s happened, she’s intent on picking apart the details.

Maka climbs up behind Soul on the bike. “You good?” he asks before starting the engine. She wants to say no, wants to say that everything about today feels like some kind of surreal fever dream, that every time she thinks she’s got a handle on it all, that she can start to _fix_ things, the rug gets pulled out from underneath her again.

She swallows, tightens her grip on Soul’s waist. “Yeah, ready when you are.”

The house is small, cozy, and achingly familiar - it’s the same house Tsubaki and Black*Star have been living in since they became partners, and despite the fact that she’s been here tons of times _before_ , she can’t help the deep sense of foreboding that fills her at the sight.

Angela pauses before she unlocks the door. “I’m not sure if Tsu is home or not, but I don’t _think_ it will be an issue. No one other than me has called or looked for you today, have they?” They both shake their heads. “Okay, cool. I have a theory that my magic is keeping you hidden from everyone else.”

“Like, physically?” Soul asks. “Because I’m pretty sure the coffeemonkey saw me when I ordered earlier.”

“Barista,” Maka corrects automatically.

Angela winces. “Not exactly? I mean, she didn’t give you a second look, so it might be like. You’re _here_ , but you’re...not memorable? I’m not sure.”

“And if that’s not the case?”

Angela turns her key and pushes the door open. “Let’s worry about that when it becomes a problem,” she says and steps inside.

They toe their shoes off in the entryway, and Maka tries to surreptitiously look around. It’s both the house she remembers and not. Half the furniture is different and it’s gently messy - a sweater thrown over the couch, magazines and books stacked on one of the end tables. The coffee table has a half full cup of tea on it. Messy, but not the same as when they’d come visit and Black*Star’s ninja crap would be strewn across the living room, the occasional throwing star sticking out of the drywall, bags of snacks half eaten and scattered between the armchair and the kitchen.

There are pictures up on the walls that she’s never never seen before, and she’s not sure that she wants to look at them just yet.

“Tsu?” Angela calls. “I’m home.”

“Back so soon? You and Maka usually take a lot longer.” Tsubaki pops her head out of the kitchen, then blinks, clearly startled to see guests.

Maka knows she should say something, but her words are stuck in her throat. This is one of her best friends, and all she can think is - _does she know me? Can she tell that I’m not her Maka...are we even friends in the future?_

“I had some stuff here I forgot and wanted Maka to see; I hope that’s alright,” Angela said, a study in casualness.

Tsubaki smiles. “Of course, you know you’re always welcome - it’s just been a little while. It’s good to see you both.”

“I’m a time traveler,” Maka blurts out, ignoring the way that Soul and Angela both turn to stare at her, mouths open. Tsubaki just looks at her, doesn’t respond in any way, eyes gone a little vacant. “Thanks, Tsu. It means a lot to me, to us both,” she adds a moment later, and it’s deeply unsettling, like watching an animatronic whir back to life.

“Any time, Maka, you know that.” Her smile is a little more genuine. “I was actually about to head out - Kid wants the new NOT class to double up on hand to hand and he always hands them off to me first.”

“That’s because he expects them to underestimate you and then get their butts kicked,” Angela pipes up and it has the feel of a well-worn conversation. Maka wants to ask why Tsubaki’s teaching, why Kid is the one calling the shots - she has so many questions about this place that feels less and less like the future and more like a twisted parallel universe.

“You’d think they would learn after having Maka teach them.” Tsubaki laughs and then darts in to pull Soul and Maka in for a hug. Her arms are familiar and tight as she squeezes them. “It’s so good to see you both together again,” she murmurs, then pulls back. “Help yourselves to anything in the kitchen while I’m out - Angie, let me know if there’s anything I need to pick up on my home. I’ll see you guys again soon, yeah?”

“I, uh. Yeah, absolutely,” Maka says, while Soul adds a quiet, “Thanks, Tsubaki.”

“I will, Tsu. Have fun.”

She beams at them all before heading out, leaving Maka and Soul staring after her.

“I’m not entirely sure what just happened,” Soul admits after a moment.

Angela lets out a heavy sigh and directs a glare towards Maka. “Well, for one, Maka decided to test our theory about _how_ my magic is keeping you all hidden, so on the plus side, I don’t think we have to worry about anyone else discovering that you’re not Soul and Maka as we know them. However, I also almost had a heart attack, so thanks for that.”

Soul closes his eyes. “Yeah, she does that sometimes,” he says, but even Maka can hear the fondness in his voice, and it makes something warm nestle in her chest.

“It was the most expeditious way to figure out the bounds of Angela’s concealment. We could have just laughed it off if it didn’t work,” she defends. “Benefits of being a chameleon witch, huh?”

Angela snorts. “What gave it away? Was it the hat? You know, that looks like a chameleon?”

Soul coughs to hide his bark of laughter.

“I didn’t want to assume anything. After all, apparently I _teach_ now.” She crosses her arms. “Now we know, regardless. So, let’s revisit that whole...story from the top.”

They sit together in the kitchen, and Angela starts her story with a contract, three fights, and a death.

“You’re the little witch Black*Star mentioned,” Soul says once she’s done.

Angela smiles, small. “He never stopped calling me that,” she says. “After he and Mifune fought for the last time, he and Tsubaki took me in. You all welcomed me into Shibusen, into your lives. Even though I was a witch.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Maka says. Her head is cradled in her hands, elbows on the table. “We’ve always been trained to see witches as our enemy, as part of the problem. And you said earlier, at the coffee shop, Kim’s a witch, too?”

Angela nods. “There are more than a few of us at Shibusen, especially since the Kishin gained power. There are even a few who are weapons or meisters. Lord Death kept a lot of information from all of us. Maka - my Maka - and I spent a lot of time researching how we all interconnect.”

“Nothing’s ever black and white.” Soul huffs out a bitter little laugh and rubs his chest absently. “Why would _this_ be.”

“Unfortunately accurate. Kid’s been...Kid’s done a lot to improve relationships between Shibusen and the Witches’ Council.”

“Kid...Kid’s really in charge, then?”

“It’s a war,” Angela says. “And we’ve lost a lot of people. Whatever it was before between pre-kishin, witches, and Shibusen, it’s nothing compared to how it is now. Asura’s release changed everything.”

Maka and Soul look at each other, hearts sinking. “He’s already been released,” Soul says. “We did everything we could to prevent it, but…”

“So that’s not what you’re here for,” Angela finishes. “I was hoping we could stop this whole damn thing before it started.” She laughs, a bitter sound that resonates with Maka, with the frustration she’s been feeling since watching Chrona cut Soul down.

“Of course it’s not that easy,” Soul says. “When has anything been that easy for us.” Maka meets his gaze. They skirted around it this morning, so focused on trying to figure out what the hell was going on that they barely acknowledged the tension between them. She’d been deliberately ignoring the fact that she was to blame for more than just Soul’s scar, that he hadn’t come out of their fight with Chrona with only a physical reminder, but with a parasite inhabiting his body, maybe even one that can control him, if what he’d alluded to earlier was anything to go by. He gives her a tentative smile that she’s not expecting, knocks his knuckles gently against her thigh and knocks her out of her head.

“That’s why we have each other,” she says, as tentative as his smile where once she would have declared it as boldly as Black*Star. Soul’s shoulders relax, and this time, his grin is _real_ , like the Soul from before the hospital.

“So it’s gotta be something after then that needs to be fixed...and you don't remember ever meeting me before, so that gives us a little bit of a window to work with,” Angela says, breaking through whatever _moment_ they just had.

Make takes a deep breath, shifts so that her thigh is more solidly pressed against Soul’s. “So, after Asura...when do we meet you?”

“I didn’t meet you two until after Mifune was killed during the failed assault on Baba Yaga’s Castle.”

“We were, uh, taken? Time traveled? Before any of that,” Maka offers. “The last thing I remembered was our fight with Chrona in Italy.”

“For me it was right after we went to the golem village and fell into an ambush by Arachne,” Soul adds.

Angela leans forward in her chair. “Wait, so you time traveled from _different_ points in time?”

“A couple of months between,” Soul confirms.

“That’s gotta mean something. The key has to be with you two, specifically.”

“Maybe something related to the Kishin?” Maka asks. “Or something tangential to him?”

“Could be? If he’s already out in your time, we can’t change that.” Angela pushes back from the table, sighing heavily. “I need to think about it some more, see if there’s anything I can pinpoint with this information.”

“We’re here to help, whatever you need,” Maka says, and Soul nods with her.

“I - I really appreciate that, but I don’t know how - I’m not sure how much my notes will make sense to you.”

Maka straightens as that. “You said I was helping you research.”

“You, plus twelve years of additional knowledge has been helping me research. I’m not trying to like, knock your intelligence, but it’s a lot to expect you to just be able to absorb and intuit out of nowhere.” Maka deflates at that, and Soul pats her knee. It’s frustrating to hear, her pride flaring up, but it makes sense. “Also, I’m not sure how much of the future I should be telling you about all willy-nilly.”

“If we’re here to fix something, who’s to say that it matters?” Soul asks.

“That is a great question, but I don’t really wanna risk breaking reality any more that I already have. Why don’t you guys head home and I’ll see what else I can dig up now that I’ve got a starting point and we can reconvene tomorrow?”

Maka and Soul exchange glances, and Maka sighs at the look on his face. _Always the voice of reason_ , she thinks. “Alright. We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

They’re halfway out the door when Maka pauses. “I’ll be down in a second,” she tells Soul. She thinks about lying, about saying she forgot something, but instead says, “I need to ask Angela something real quick.”

“Okay,” he agrees after a moment, and she could kiss him for not pressing the issue, for trusting her. “I’ll get the bike warmed up.”

She slips back into the house, only to find Angela still sitting at the kitchen table. “You forget something?”

“Only a question.” Maka steels herself, exhales. “What are Soul and I to each other now?”

Angela stares at her for a long moment, and for the first time since they met, Maka genuinely understands the fact that despite her body being older, despite knowing that Angela grew up knowing this Maka, Angela is a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, and Maka’s still, at heart, a fifteen year old girl.

“Why do you ask?” she finally says.

“Because Tsubaki looked like she’d seen a ghost when she saw us together. Because you keep looking at us like you’re not sure what to think, and I have a feeling it _isn’t_ because of your spell. Because when we woke up here -” Maka stops, swallows, squeezes her eyes shut. “There’s nothing of his in my apartment.”

“The honest answer is that I don’t know what you are to each other now,” Angela replies. “But I do know that you stopped living together a long time ago.” She looks thoughtful, and Maka wishes she knew her a little better so she could interpret that look. “Tsubaki and Black*Star used to talk about it before he died, but they never figured out where things changed with you two. Or if they did, they never shared it with me.”

“And I’m really not a meister anymore?”

“You stopped active duty five? Six years ago? You never said why and I’m not sure I could tell you even if I did know.”

Maka sucks in a breath. “Okay.” She nods jerkily. “Okay. Thank you, Angela.”

She’s almost to the bike when Angela calls out from the doorway, “Call me Angie.”

Maka nods and climbs on behind Soul. It’s almost dark out now, and when Angela closes the door to the house, it snuffs out the biggest light source on the street. In the dark, it’s easier for Maka to wind her arms around Soul’s waist, to press her forehead between his shoulder blades and take a moment to breathe in her partner.

When Soul speaks, it’s just loud enough to hear over the sound of the engine. “Do you mind if we stop by my apartment before we go home?”

She doesn’t miss his phrasing. _Home_. She nods into his spine, and Soul pops the kickstand up and revs the engine.

* * *

Angela locks the door behind her and heads straight for her bedroom with what she’s learned and what she remembers swirling around in her mind, overlapping and intersecting as she tries to make sense of it all. She knows what she was trying to do, knows now what the immediate result was, and understands better the breadth of the spell.

Even with her years of studying, with the full bore of her powers and the added boost of the new moon, there’s no way the spell should have been able to pluck Soul and Maka out of different pasts and bring them twelve years into the future.

It shouldn’t have, but it did.

All Angela had wanted was Mifune back, to right the wrongness of his death. She’s increasingly certain that the spell is trying to fix something that goes deeper than Mifune, deeper even than Asura and his madness. She just has to figure out _what_ that is.


	5. Chapter 5

Soul’s apartment turns out to be not terribly far from Maka’s place. He wishes he could be surprised - even though Future Soul wasn’t living with Future Maka, he still kept close enough that he could walk over to her place if he needed to. He’s self-aware enough to know what that means.

“Do you want me to stay here?” Maka asks once he’s parked. She’s still got her hands on his waist.

“I was hoping you’d come up, help me take a look around.”

She nods and follows him up to the third floor. It takes him a few minutes to find the right key, but he finally fumbles it into the lock and opens the door. It’s an efficiency, and although it’s on the large side, almost the entirety of the floorplan is still visible from the door, and Soul is deeply embarrassed for his older self.

“Shouldn’t take long,” he finally says, heading for the bed that’s tucked away in one corner, behind a privacy screen.

“Am I looking for anything in particular?” Maka asks, meandering into the kitchenette. “Other than your surprisingly robust set of kitchen knives?”

“Good to know I’m still the better cook,” Soul returns, rummaging through the top of his dresser. “I dunno. We don’t live together anymore, Maka, and I’m not sure what that means for my life, if I’m being honest.” He keeps his head ducked, can’t bear to see the look of pity on Maka’s face. He really is completely pathetic. “How much can change in twelve years? Do we still work for Shibusen? Am I...are we even partners anymore? I’m a Death Scythe - I can feel the power, but _how_ , _when_? Did we do this together or was it some meister I don’t even know?”

He cuts himself off before he can say anything more. All he’s found on the dresser is his phone charger and jar of change. There’s a desk he’s going to try next. He straightens up, turns, and runs into Maka, who he never heard moving. Her arms are around him before he can react, and he wants to pull away, disgusted by his own worthlessness. What does it matter how he became a Death Scythe as long as he achieved it?

“We did it together,” Maka says into his collarbone. “I promised you I’d make you a Death Scythe, and there’s nothing you could do that would make me break that promise. Even if I’m not a meister anymore...it would have been me.”

Soul sighs, lets himself be held for a moment. Maka’s grip tightens for a second before she releases him. “I’m going to check the desk. You wanna get the coffee table - see if I left any clues there?”

“Yeah, of course.” They search in silence for another ten minutes, but don’t find anything useful.

“This is tragic,” Soul says. “If it weren’t for my key and my clothes, you’d barely know that I even live here.”

“And the knives,” Maka adds with a little smile.

The joke’s weak, but it’s enough to make him feel a little less like a complete failure. “Can’t forget the knives,” he agrees. He takes a leap before he can chicken out. “I’m gonna pack up some clothes and my toiletries and then we can go?”

“Back home?” Maka asks.

“Back home,” he confirms, pretending he can’t read the relief in her expression.

“Alright, but I’m bringing the knives with us.”

They stop for takeout on the way back to Maka’s apartment, and by unspoken mutual agreement, spend the rest of the evening on her couch, watching TV shows they’ve never heard of and pushing away thoughts of their predicament to deal with in the morning.

When they go to bed, Maka hesitates for a moment, and Soul takes the decision out of her hands.

“Do you think the spare blankets are still in the hall closet?”

“Soul -”

“I’m stealing one of your pillows, though. I don’t care how comfy the couch is, I need a real pillow.”

Maka sighs, but he doesn’t think he’s imagining the relief in her eyes. No matter what they are, or aren’t to each other, she’s still his meister, still one of his best friends, and he’ll be damned if he makes her uncomfortable because he didn’t want to sleep in his shitty efficiency apartment by himself. “I’ll get the comforter for you.”

He changes into actual pajama pants and brushes his teeth while she makes up the couch, and it’s the work of a moment when he's done to burrito into the couch while Maka looks on from her doorway.

“You good?” she teases, and he closes his eyes as if he could absorb her fondness.

“It’ll do,” he says. “Thanks, Maka. Sleep well.”

“You too.” She turns, pauses. “You know...I wouldn’t have let anyone else make you a Death Scythe unless you asked me to,” she says, almost too quiet for him to hear.

“You weren’t the only one who made a promise that day,” he replies, loud enough that he _knows_ she can’t pretend she didn’t hear him. “It was always going to be you.”

That’s it for his bravery today, he thinks, watching the silhouette of her shoulders, the sweep of her hair, the curve of her hips backlit by the lamp in her room. Maka has always been the brave one, is always trying to save him, protect him, make him better.

“Thank you, Soul,” she whispers, voice cracking. She closes the door, plunging the living room into darkness before he can think of a response.

* * *

“Any luck?” Maka asks when she opens the door to Angela the next morning.

“Well, good morning to you, too,” she says, stepping inside.

Maka winces, chastised. “Sorry, we’re just - _I’m_ just really on edge. I feel like the more I think about this whole thing, the more questions I have, and it’s driving me up a wall.”

“Almost literally,” Soul mumbles from the kitchen. “Hi Angela,” Soul says, louder. “You hungry? I’m making pancakes.”

Angela can’t remember the last time she was in Maka’s apartment, but she doesn’t remember it feeling like this - it feels lighter, like there’s more sunshine coming in the windows even though the blinds are still closed. Like it’s more than just the place where Maka stores her clothes and does her laundry.

She puts her messenger bag full of research down on the coffee table. “Yeah, that’d be great, thank you.”

Soul smiles at her from the kitchen. “Coffee’s up too, if you want some.”

“I’ll get you a mug,” Maka offers immediately. “I need a refill anyway. Make yourself at home.”

_Home_. It feels like a home, almost like her own house feels. Angela watches Soul and Maka move around each other like a well-oiled machine and wonders if this is what they were like before. They were still partners when she came to Shibusen, but she didn’t have much cause to watch them fight together until after Baba Yaga’s castle. She mostly remembers the way everyone was somber afterwards. Her first impression of Maka was someone who scowled too much. She remembers Black*Star talking about how they had fought Arachne, but the witch had escaped, taking Medusa with her. Angela had been too young, too caught up in the changes happening to think about it until after she found out the truth of Mifune’s death.

She remembers Soul and Maka finally killing the witch, his ascension to Death Scythe, and then --

Maka sets the cup down on the table in front of her. “Cream and sugar’s on the table if you want any,” she says, going back into the kitchen to take down plates.

Angela grips the mug on autopilot, but doesn’t drink. There’s a hint of something in that thought, something she can almost put her finger on. Soul flips another pancake onto a plate and Maka gets the syrup out of the fridge and Angela wonders if she could see souls like Maka can, like Stein could, what she’d see between them.

She hadn’t considered it last night when Maka asked if she was a teacher instead of a meister, hadn’t ever really thought about why she stopped fighting and switched to teaching almost exclusively. She’s starting to realize that it lines up pretty closely to when she finished making Soul a Death Scythe.

“To answer your question, Maka, I’m not sure how last night went,” Angela finally offers. “I looked a little closer at the spell, taking into account a working theory I have, and I think that one of the reasons I can see my magic on you two is that technically the spell isn’t complete yet.”

“That sounds...promising?”

Angela waggles her hand back and forth. “The spell was meant to fix something, so in theory, once it’s fixed, the spell should complete and you two will go back to being where you’re supposed to be.”

“In theory,” Soul says flatly from the kitchen.

“Theories are all I have now, unfortunately.”

“And the magic is centered on us, so we’re definitely supposed to be the ones doing the fixing,” Maka says, shooting a look at Soul, and Angela nods. “Which we knew already. But we still don’t know what it is that we have to fix.”

“Hence why I wouldn’t call the rest of my evening successful. It could be anything in the window we established, and we have no way of telling what it is because I only know what happens here, and you don’t know what happens after you left, and -”

“And we’ll figure it out,” Maka interrupts before she can spiral any further, setting down the plate of pancakes. Angela finally doctors her coffee, taking a sip as Soul brings in another plate, this one piled high with scrambled eggs and bacon.

“Oh, man this is a lot more than I was expecting,” she says, eyeballing the pancakes.

Soul shrugs, hiding a smile behind his own mug. “For someone who doesn’t like cooking, Maka had an awful lot of food in her fridge. Figured I’d help get rid of some of it.”

Maka looks like she’s about to argue, but she just glares a little and steals the piece of bacon Soul put on his plate instead. “So do you think you’d be able to tell if we were on the right track to figuring it out? Like, would the magical...aura around us change?”

“It would probably start to either shrink or expand, though I’m not sure which.”

“So we should just start guessing and go from there,” Maka concludes, biting into her stolen bacon with relish.

Angela’s jaw drops. Even if she didn’t have her own reasons for completing the spell, she thinks that it would be worth it to see her Maka like _this_ , filled with this casual confidence that they’ll work this out, instead of the reserved coolness she’s used to seeing. It’s different even from the Maka who sat across from her last night, and she wonders what happened after they left her last night.

Across from her, Soul takes a bite of his eggs, but he’s nodding in agreement. He catches Angela’s eye. “We just needed a direction,” he says, as if he could read her mind.

What would these two have been like in the prime of their partnership, Angela wonders. If this is them out of place and out of time, unsure and adrift and painfully young, why didn’t they have a bigger impact on the fight against Asura?

There’s an almost imperceptible flash, a moment where she can almost see them fighting, can almost envision a turning point in the fight against the Kishin, but it’s gone as quickly as it appeared.

“What happened with Asura?” she asks before she can think better of it.

Soul stiffens in his seat, but he’s the only one who can tell this part. He glances over at Maka, who doesn’t even pretend to hide her own interest. “We did our best, but we were slowed down fighting Medusa and Chrona. She had a team of witches helping her, and between them and Asura’s madness...Maka and I got there too late to help keep him under control. And once he was free, not even Lord Death could keep him contained.”

Maka reaches out and grips his wrist for a moment in silent support. “I know we did everything we could,” she says, and Angela isn’t imagining the way Soul’s jaw clenches or the way his eyes dart away.

“I keep thinking about your departure points,” Angela says, shaking off the feeling that Soul’s definitely leaving out some key points. “And I can’t figure out _why_. Can either of you think about any similarity between the two incidents? Anything at all?”

Maka and Soul glance at each other, then away just as quickly. It’s like watching a well-choreographed dance, if the people involved had no idea they were actually dancing. Angela watches in fascination as Maka straightens her spine, as Soul’s frown deepens and his eyebrows arrow downward, as they both open their mouths.

“I fucked up,” they say in unison.

Around them the aura of the spell pulses a warm, glowing blue, surging outward as they speak, and Angela can’t bite back her gasp. Soul and Maka stare at each other, faces stricken and unaware that they’d just stumbled into the key to finishing the spell.

“Soul --” Maka’s voice is soft, pained and when she wraps her small hand around his wrist this time, she doesn’t let go.

“Maka, I --” his voice cracks. He stops, swallows thickly. “We should…”

“Later,” she says, and Angela can see where the thin skin of his wrist is white under Maka’s grip. He doesn’t pull away, just nods in agreement and lets her hold on.

They turn to look at her, and for a long moment, she’s not sure what to say. Of all the things they would have to fix -- she remembers the look on Maka’s face as she left the night before, the quiet devastation of learning that she’s no longer a meister, the resignation in her eyes when Angela had confirmed that she and Soul hadn’t been partners in years. She thinks of the looks she’s seen on Soul’s face when Maka isn’t looking, when he thinks that no one would be paying attention, the guilt and turmoil she’s seen in him, and it feels like a puzzle piece slotting together. She takes a steadying breath and tries to channel the demeanor of Tsubaki when she used to have to rein in Black*Star -- authoritative but in a way that always made it feel like it was your idea.

“So that’s your commonality, then,” Angela finally says. “There’s clearly something going on here that needs to be addressed.”

“And what, that’s it?” Soul asks, skeptical despite clearly being shaken.

“I don’t know, but the spell doesn’t lie. Something about you each blaming yourselves caused it to,” she mimes an explosion with her hands. “I think you need to explore that and see where it leads you.”

“And if that’s not all of it?” Maka interjects.

“Then we keep guessing, just like you said. There’s probably more, but we actually have a concrete lead for right now you too should explore.”

“And if that _is_ all of it?”

Angela blinks. “Then the spell completes and you go home.”

“That’s it? How will we know what we need to do in the past to make sure we don’t fuck everything up? Will we remember what happened here?”

“I don’t think the spell will send you back if there’s a danger of the past repeating itself,” Angela says.

“And will it...will it bring your...people back?” Soul cuts in.

Angela freezes in her seat. “I -- I don’t know.” She thought she knew what the spell would do, thought that she had planned it all out perfectly, that the greatest evil in their world could be fixed if only Mifune were here. If only he could fill back up the void left by his own death, by the deaths of Black*Star and Blair, of Ox and Azusa, of Marie and Stein and Lord Death, the EAT kids that Patti taught, even the NOT kids who shouldn’t have ever been involved, lost to the ceaseless fight against his madness and his minions.

But instead, her only hope, the spell she had spent most of her life finding and researching and attempting to perfect, brought her Soul and Maka. A little broken, but so much more whole than the meister and weapon Angela grew up with. Her Soul and Maka hadn’t given up the fight, but they’d given up each other, and Angela hadn’t known just how much of a difference that made until she’d seen them together like this.

“What happens to you? What happens to this timeline if we go back?” Maka adds.

And that, Angela is pretty sure she knows the answer to. “It doesn’t matter,” she says instead. “What matters is that we can make things better.”

“You die,” Soul says, blunt and looking more upset than she would have expected. He twists his wrist and Maka loosens her grip, but he tangles his fingers into hers before she can move her hand away.

“I can’t die if this version of me never existed,” Angela says, because it’s true, because she hopes that’s what happens if it means that she doesn’t have to keep living this life without so many people she cares for, if it means that Tsubaki’s house is filled with laughter and the noise of three people instead of the quiet, careful grief of two? If it means Soul and Maka fighting together and Asura weak enough to be defeated? If it means there’s a chance a version of her will see Mifune again, even if for a little while?

Yeah, that would be worth it.

She stands up from the kitchen table, and she thinks that she’d be okay with never sitting at a kitchen table again -- too many fraught conversations have happened over kitchen tables in the last few days for her taste.

“I think I’m going to go ahead and head out. You two have some stuff to work out, and I need to --” she waves her hand, suddenly feeling inexplicably exhausted by the thought of more research, of going home and waiting for...whatever. Death? The timeline to reset? Dinner? She wants to go home and hug Tsubaki.

Maka looks like she wants to protest, but this time it’s Soul who squeezes, and she snaps her mouth shut instead.

Angela looks between them, still sitting together and looking a little lost. The spell’s aura holds steady, and although it isn’t growing anymore, it’s still pulsating and tinging blue Soul and Maka’s hands where they’re clasped together. Before she can talk herself out of it, she darts over and engulfs first Soul, then Maka, in a hug. She doesn’t say, “just in case,” although she’s pretty sure that they’re all thinking it.

“I’ll let you know if anything else comes up,” she says instead. “See you tomorrow.”

Angela doesn’t give them the chance to try and convince her to stay because she knows it wouldn’t take much.

* * *

“What do you mean, ‘I fucked up’?” Maka is the first one brave enough to ask. Soul doesn’t want to answer now anymore than he wanted to talk about his failures after Italy, after Asura, and now, after Arachne.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Soul prevaricates.

“And I’ll tell you. But I asked first.” She sets her jaw, all familiar stubbornness, and god, Soul doesn’t know what to do with her sometimes.

This whole debacle has forced him to face a lot of truths about himself and about his relationship with Maka -- what it is and what he wants it to be. She’s always been the brave one, with courage enough for the both of them, but he likes to think he’s learned more than a little from here. The thought of a future like this -- of an endless war, of their dead friends -- and to know that through it all, all he has to show for it is a shitty efficiency and a Death Scythe status that he can’t even share with his meister.

“I fucked up, Maka. I wasn’t strong enough as your weapon in Italy and you almost got killed --” Maka opens her mouth, and he squeezes her hand. “Please, I’m...just let me finish or I’ll never get it out.” She nods, swallows. “But I could get past that because I at least saved you. I could protect you from Chrona, and I was _happy_ to do so. I never told you about the Black Blood and the nightmares because at first I thought they were just dreams and then later, it could give me the power I needed to be a weapon worthy of you.”

He stares down at the table for a long moment, but Maka doesn’t interject. He can feel her eyes on his face, but he does his best to just focus on his words, his _feelings_. “And then there was our second fight with Chrona, and Asura. I almost got you lost in the madness of the Black Blood, and then I couldn’t even do anything to help once Asura escaped. And you know, that I could live with. No one else could do anything either, but then there was the golem village. Arachne’s spider silk completely paralyzed you and I was stuck _again_. I could barely defend you, and I had to sit there and rely on someone else to protect you, to defeat Giriko and Arachne. When Justin showed up and he could just...wield himself like it was _nothing_ , like it was as easy as breathing...”

Next to him, Maka tenses and for a moment, he thinks she’s going to leave. This part, more than anything, must feel like betrayal. “I don’t want to wield myself so that I don’t have to have a meister. I want to be able to be strong for you, Maka. I don’t want to have to rely on someone else to protect you. I should be able to do it. You’re going to be the best and I want to help you get there. I want _you_ for my meister, Maka.”

“What about that time with Black*Star,” she says before she can stop herself, and even though it’s a joke, her voice is thick. Soul barks out a laugh. That showdown with Kid feels like a lifetime ago. It may as well be, he thinks, looking at the scars and calluses on his hands.

“I think we all -- we both know that was never going to happen. We were just kids, fooling around. We’re _all still_ just kids, somewhere, and I’m scared of not being enough for you.” He stops then, words exhausted, emotions raw and scraping against his stomach. “But you’re still the only meister I’ve ever wanted. That I’ll _ever_ want.”

He still can’t bring himself to look at Maka. She wears her heart on her sleeve and her emotions in her eyes, and he can’t risk seeing loathing, recrimination. The silence between them stretches on interminably. When Maka clears her throat, it’s all he can do not to flinch.

“I fucked up,” she finally says. “I’m the one who insisted we go to Italy. I was arrogant and overconfident in my abilities...in my soul perception, in my strength as a meister. You tried to warn me, and I didn’t listen and what you got for it was _vivisected_.”

“Maka, it’s my _job_ \--”

“Soul, _please_. I let you finish, can you do me the same courtesy?” Her voice is strained, and he subsides, but not willingly. “I didn’t listen to you, and I didn’t listen to my instincts, and I got you hurt so, so badly. I know you think it’s your job to protect me,” she says, and Soul bites down on his lip hard enough to taste the copper bloom of blood, but he doesn’t interrupt again. “But it’s _my_ job to protect you, too. To be strong enough and smart enough to know when to retreat, to not put us in the kind of situations where you feel like throwing your _human body in front of me_ is the only option. I want _so badly_ to be better than my parents, to be someone that they’re proud of, to be more than just their legacy, but I...I can’t do that at the expense of _you_. I can’t keep letting my pride get in my way.” It’s Soul who’s doing the staring now; he takes in the familiar upturn of her nose, the barely-there dusting of freckles across her cheeks, the way she keeps her hair tucked behind her ears.

“I can’t let my _fear_ get in my way, either.” He’s not expecting her to look up from where she’s been staring at their entwined hands, for her eyes, damp with emotion, to bore into his. He’s caught. “Even before Italy, I was afraid.” She swallows. “I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for you to finally realize that I’m...I’m _me_ , this uncool bookworm who’s just holding you back, that I’m never going to be _enough_. When you jumped in front of me, I was terrified that I’d gotten you killed. Then when you lied about your nightmares, I thought _this is it_ , _this is finally when he leaves_. But it wasn’t a new thought, just the same one I’ve been having since we became partners.”

She sandwiches his hand between hers, runs fine-boned fingers along his in a way that makes his heart thud a little faster, a little louder. He’s never understood her hands, how they can be so small, but so strong, how they’re delicate even when they’re covered with callouses from wielding him, from fighting and training and countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears.

“I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I look at this life and I hate myself because I just _know_ it’s my fault that we’re like this -- that I must have pulled away, that I thought it was better to leave you than have you leave me. I don’t want this, Soul. I don’t want this life where our friends are dead, where we’ve been torn apart.

“So I’m scared. But you said you’re scared, too. So I’m going to believe you, even if it’s hard for me to understand why you feel like you failed me when that’s all I feel I’ve done for you. And I’m going to ask you to trust me, too, when I say that you’ve never let me down, you’ve never once failed me. All you’ve ever done is believe in me, believe in _us_ ; you’ve protected me and fought with me, and made me want to be stronger. You’re an incredible weapon,” and finally, _finally,_ her voice shatters, tears spilling down her cheeks. “But more importantly, you’re the only partner I’ll ever want, too.”

Soul tugs at their hands, words completely unable to express the feeling coursing through his body, and Maka follows, slumping easily against him. He presses Maka’s palm against his chest, where they both know his scar is, and all he can do is bury his face in her hair, lips brushing against her cheek, the tip of her ear, a promise he can’t articulate any other way.

He doesn’t know how long they stay that way, but it’s long enough that his butt’s starting to ache from sitting on the hard wooden chair. He shifts a little, ignores the dampness of the collar of his t-shirt, and decides that it’s time to at least move somewhere more comfortable.

“Hey,” he murmurs before he can think better of it. His voice is hoarse from disuse.

“Mm?”

“You wanna go take a nap? I don’t know about you, but all this feelings stuff is exhausting.”

She lifts her head, eyes still a little red as she searches his face. She nods. “Yeah, that sounds good.” She straightens up and they both wince at the popping noise her back makes. “My room,” she states it like it’s a foregone conclusion, and for a moment, Soul thinks that if this is Maka attacking her fears, he might not survive.

The stupid thing is, he thinks as she leads him to her bed, is that it’s barely afternoon and they never made it out of their pjs. Maka climbs under the covers first, wriggling around to situate herself, and Soul slips in next to her, props himself up on his side, snagging one of the pillows and pummeling it into submission.

For a long moment they just lay there, staring at each other, a bizarre parody of how they woke up -- god, was it only yesterday? Soul feels like he’s aged another twelve years in that time. Maka’s eyes are already dropping, but her lips are curved in a soft smile, and Soul thinks that it’s time for him to attack his fears as well.

He inches closer, and Maka mirrors him. His fingers skim up her neck, along her jaw, and he’s leaning in that last little distance, pressing his lips to hers. There aren’t any fireworks, no explosions of lust and passion, although _one day_ , Soul thinks. Their kiss feels like home, like it’s _right_ , and they fall asleep like that, trading gentle, careful kisses.


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

Angela unlocks the door to the house and kicks her shoes off in the entry, the same way she’s done for the past twelve years. Her legs feel like lead as she stumbles into the living room. Tsubaki is still home, and the sight of her sprawled out on the couch settles something in Angela’s chest. She knows for certain that Tsu got up before her this morning, worked out, had her own breakfast, and is now napping -- the same routine she’s had for years. There’s always the possibility that the spell will need more than just a reconciliation of whatever it is going on between them, but there’s something about how the spell had reacted…

Angela’s pretty sure they’d hit on the solution. She wishes that she could better see the architecture of the spell. Maybe Soul was right when had reprimanded her for casting a spell with so much ambiguity woven into the fabric, but as she looks down at Tsubaki, the way that, even in peaceful sleep, the tension around her eyes and mouth still lingers, she still thinks it will have been worth it.

* * *

Soul wakes up alone and disoriented. His chest aches for a moment, a profound sense of loss because he knows with certainty that Maka isn’t next to him. It takes him another few minutes of staring at the ceiling before he realizes that she’s not beside him because he’s in _his room_ and she’s...she’s in the infirmary.

He scrambles out of bed, shoves his legs into the first pair of pants he can find and doesn’t bother to change out of his sleep shirt. Blair’s lounging on windowsill in the living room, soaking up the sun in her cat form, and Soul runs a hand through her fur before shoving his feet into his shoes and heading out the door.

When he finally reaches the infirmary, he has to physically slow himself down so he isn’t out of breath. He doesn’t know why he’s trying to act nonchalant. Nothing about him is nonchalant, especially when it comes to his meister, laying paralyzed in her bed on the other side of the door, months after he knows she returned to the timeline. _No fear_ , he thinks.

He opens the door and she’s sitting up, staring at him in her stupid striped pjs, her hair tangled around her shoulders, a careful smile on her face.

“Hey,” she says, quiet and perfect. “I’ve been waiting for you to catch up.”

He moves into the room, sits on the edge of her bed, and tangles their fingers together, and says, “I’m here.”


End file.
